THE POISON GARDEN website

Pontifications on Poison

Being some ramblings on events associated with poisonous plants.

Wednesday 12th October 2011

After
yesterday’s rather heavy topic, I thought I’d go for
something a little lighter today, though it is still on the
theme of truth and lies and how we describe them.

Although I live in Scotland I am close enough to the border
to be able to pick up TV transmission from the north-east of
England. I tend to watch the BBC’s local news for the north-east
because the Scottish news is mostly about Edinburgh and politics
whereas the north-east news has more items that are relevant to
me.

For example, the story that sparked this blog is about the
Kielder Marathon and the woman who runs Kielder’s commercial
activities used to be employed at the Alnwick Garden. So, I
can’t help wondering how she’s reacting to
the story that the runner who was, originally, awarded third
place had travelled part of the way by bus. Even as Rob
Sloan was being interviewed for TV on his third place finish the
man placed fourth, who knew he hadn’t been passed by anyone to
take the third place he’d been in all along, was preparing to
tell the organisers that something had gone on.

When the organisers began to make enquiries they soon found
people who said they had seen him on one of the buses being used
to ferry spectators and runners who had pulled out to the
finish. My first reason for blogging about this is because it
reminded me of the time this happened during the 1904 Olympic
Games.

Travelling to the USA was no easy matter and, as a result,
only 12 countries were represented at the games. Even so, some
of the competitors for the 11 non-host countries were Americans
with some tenuous link to the country they represented. And it
wasn’t just this small entry field that made the 1904 games less
than the Olympic movement hoped for.

First across the line in the marathon was an American called
Fred Lorz but it took only a short time before suspicions were
aroused. People said they had seen him waving from a vehicle
along the route and, when challenged, Lorz freely admitted he
had ridden for quite a distance after becoming exhausted. It is
said that the vehicle he was in broke down short of the stadium
so he completed the journey on foot and was surprised when he
was acclaimed the winner. He appears to have claimed that he got
caught up by events and wasn’t able to tell anyone he was not
the rightful winner.

After the error came to light, the gold medal was awarded to
Thomas Hicks. Hicks was an American citizen but, having been
born in England, he was competing for the UK. But Hicks own
marathon was not without incident. He had collapsed from
exhaustion around fifteen miles into the event and his support
team gave him strychnine, from
Strychnos nux-vomica, the poison nut tree, mixed with egg
whites and washed down with brandy to revive him.

Some reports suggest that he required another four ‘revivers’
before reaching the stadium and that he was so intoxicated that
his coaches held him up, with his legs still running but not in
contact with the ground, to get him over the line. Though his
feet are on the ground in the picture they may not have stayed
there.

I usually tell this story if the Q & A session after one of
my talks brings up the point about poisonous plants having
medicinal uses. Strychnine is, of course, well-known as a murder
weapon and, today, the idea of using it as a tonic amazes the
audience.

As above, the possibility of repeating the story of Thomas
Hicks’ marathon ‘win’ is only my first reason for choosing Rob
Sloan’s story for today’s blog. My second reason is to do with
the way the story unfolded and what was said about it.

Immediately after his disqualification Mr Sloan loudly
proclaimed his outrage and denied any wrongdoing. Then, on
Tuesday morning, he is said to have told a BBC reporter that he
had been on the bus. Later that morning, however, he was again
claiming to have done nothing wrong and it took a statement from
the organisers saying Mr Sloan had admitted to them that he did
not complete the course to settle the matter.

The event director responsible for the disqualification was
former Olympic athlete, Steve Cram. Cram is quoted as saying "Mr
Sloan made a mistake and has apologised to us for the confusion
it has caused."

Now it seems to me to be quite hard to make a mistake about
whether or not you boarded a bus rather than running the full
distance and Steve Cram’s choice of language seems to be very
restrained. I’m interested in what prevented Mr Cram was
directly stating the Mr Sloan had lied about what happened
because it is hard not to come to that conclusion. Its relevance
to this blog is that I faced a similar situation in deciding how
best to describe the flatly contradictory statements made by
Professor Knottenbelt which are the subject of
yesterday’s blog.